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Comment by Octabrain | Hacker News Reader

For me, bash and jq are, literally, the opposite of riding a bicycle. It doesn't matter the amount of time I spend on a given week working with them, a month later, I am gonna have to skim through my bookmarks and Kagi results (and now also chatGPT) for knowing how to do stuff I was easily doing a month ago.

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I also observed this when using most cli tools… I think it’s a common problem for tools you have to reach for a couple times a month/quarter (versus programming language when you’re coding almost everyday)

My solution was literally to create Anki cards every time I discover a neat feature that I might not remember but it would be useful too. I just go through it once a day for 10 minutes (my anki cards) and it works like a charm. My memory for various cli tools has drastically improved. Rarely do I need to reach for Google, man docs or ChatGPT for most cli tools usages. I’d recommend spaces repition for cli tools

new to me! link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software)

Thanks for adding the link!

I do similar things with Obsidian (markdown).

I get Bash, but for jq I found that my small fusillade of Anki flash cards was more than enough to get a fingertip feel for its syntax. Amazing what 50 flashcards of jq (or awk, or sed, or regexes, or any DSL really) gets you in the long run.

I wrote my response about using anki cards for this right before seeing your comment ! :D

Happy to see others have been doing that too!

It's more important to understand the possibilities than remember the details. Details can always be quickly looked up, as long as you know what to look for and can conceptualize which tools to combine to achieve a goal.

Agreed. Somethings I accept I will never mentally memorize nor muscle memory memorize. JQ is one of them. So this is a great reference.

I will never truly memorize how to use this because it's not my primary goal, nor is it the end product to process data.

Rather, it is a means to a means to a means to an end.

If I find myself struggling with a task I’ve done a handful of times, I just make a page for it in obsidian with the snippet I need and an explanation of how it works.

I save snippets in a markdown file for that reason.

ChatGPT is a great UI to both though

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